Examples
Thanks for the lively discussion. I am amazed how many people say the location of website hosting does not affect whether a site is shown under pages from Australia on Google. I have peterpullar.com and peterpullar.com.au hosted by Telstra who I believe hosts in Australia, and both sites appear in Google pages from Australia. Yet David Pearson's .au balloons site shows up on Google pages from Australia. He does have the word Australia at the end of the title of his main page.
Albatross, I don't know why it matters or how it happens, but it just does seem to have a significant effect. Apart from .au websites, it is my experience on all my own and my friends websites that the ones hosted in Australia come up on pages from Australia and those hosted elsewhere do not.
I am finding that, like it or not, lots of Australians use the Google selection of pages from Australia to narrow down their searches. I guess maybe people outside Australia experience Google the same as Australians do by logging on to google.com.au Or do they?
Also I was not aware of any .au domain names being invisible on international searches on search engines because of the .au Maybe it does happen, but I have never heard of it. Sure many international people may not want to have to remember the .au bit at the end, and it makes the domain name a bit longer which may be small disadvantages.
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